Whenever popular books are made into movies, the result can mighty varied.
Novels are often highly detailed and enjoy the luxury of spending long stretches building characters and settings.
Movie adaptations almost always have to hack out some – often a lot – of material to squeeze the gist of the story into the different medium.

About the film
The Movie Man was blown away by how great the first version of The Hunger Games was last year. He loved it (Movie Man No. 975, 9) and only the amazing Life of Pi (MM #1,011, 9) beat it out for Best of Year.